If all the athletes from Stanford had been their own country, they would have tied with South Korea for 11th place in the medal standings at the 2016 Olympics.

It’s an eye-opening statistic that has been made more jarring because of the recent decision by Stanford — renowned for fielding the most extensive college sports program in the country — to remove nine Olympic sports from its 36-team varsity program in an attempt to control a rapidly growing budget deficit in the athletic department.

Two former Stanford athletes who said they felt blindsided by the decision are spearheading a protest against a move that will affect not only the 240 athletes on the rosters when the teams are dissolved after this school year, but will have effects that stretch well beyond that, both at other colleges and in the Olympic world.

Nathalie Weiss, a coxswain on the men’s rowing team who graduated from Stanford in 2016, said when she first heard of the cuts, “I just felt like this decision was giving up.” She fears it gives cover to other schools that are considering trimming sports as their budgets are similarly decimated by the consequences of the pandemic.

“And then it’s going to impact the talent pool for the Olympic pipeline eight years down the road when the games are in Los Angeles,” Weiss said.

Without a centralized government sports ministry, which many countries employ to build their Olympic teams, the U.S. Olympic and Parlaympic Committee is deeply reliant on America’s extensive college sports program to field its team.

Of the 558 athletes the U.S. sent to Rio four years ago, around 75% came from the college sports system. Of the 121 medals the U.S. won, nearly 85% came from college-trained athletes. Stanford placed 29 athletes on the U.S. team; 15 of them stood on the medals podium, more than any other school. Another 10 Stanford athletes won medals for other countries.

USOPC figures show Division I schools spent $5.6 billion last year on Olympic sports alone.

“By and large, college sports are a lifeline for our national teams,” said Sarah Wilhelmi, the USOPC’s director of collegiate partnerships.

But the numbers have been dwindling for years. Men’s gymnastics, which survived the cut at Stanford, has fewer than 20 Division I programs. Men’s volleyball is at around two dozen.

Virtually all of the Olympic-sports budgets at big schools are subsidized by football and basketball, the futures of which are both in peril themselves. The Pac-12, where Stanford is based, has canceled fall sports. Studies say if the Power Five conferences all scrub football, it could lead to $4 billion in losses, or an average of $62 million per school.

Weiss and San Francisco-based Olympic silver- and bronze-medal fencer Alexander Massialas, who graduated from Stanford in 2016, said that despite the long-running financial troubles, Stanford athletic director Bernard Muir told them the option of cutting sports wasn’t considered until late May and the decision came less than six weeks after that.

“We see this as a demonstration of financial mismanagement, basically,” Massialas said. “They’ve known of this deficit for a few years, and in their own budget announcements, they mention they’re running a deficit, but it’s nothing they’d address in an actual way.”